The parameter list is too long

[glav]

I wrote a script to clean log files in a certain directory that are more than 3 days old but get the error "The parameter list is too long". Here is the command:

find *.log -mtime +3 -exec rm {} \;

Any idea how to clean these files automatically? Why am I getting this error? Thanks in advance for an help.

 

[mrn]

You could use

echo *.log|xargs rm

or

for i in *.log ; do
rm $i
done

Give the first a try

You get the error because the problem with the wild card is that the shell expands /*.log into a string that's too large to fit in the kernel's argument string
buffer. This is a kernel parameter that's defined in
/usr/include/ to give a 128KB buffer for the argument list.
You could change it and rebuild the kernel, but it's better to learn how do do things without generating long argument lists for a command.




--
| Mike Nixon
| Unix Admin
|
----------------------------

 

[FredMichel]

I use this format for similar clean-up activities.

find *.log -mtime +3 |xargs rm

 

[glav]

I will give that a try. Sounds like a good solution.

thanks for your help.